


A Place To Call Your Own

by carrieonmywaywardson



Category: Tomorrowland (2015)
Genre: F/M, anyway this movie had me like, eyes bright, if you got the ref you are liking the right things in life, just girls, tf have i DONE, they're just girls breaking hearts, this is it this is the ULTIMATE shipping trash, uptight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-03 04:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4085860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrieonmywaywardson/pseuds/carrieonmywaywardson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank doesn't go back home, but Casey doesn't need to tell him to.</p><p>It's sad for him to think nothing's worth salvaging.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Place To Call Your Own

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, I never walked out of this movie _wanting_ to write a fic for it, it's just that there weren't any, so yeah. Contribution.

 

Frank doesn't go back home, but Casey doesn't need to tell him to.

It's sad for him to think nothing's worth salvaging.

-

_We're a million lonely people, all together on this needle in the sky_  
_afraid of heights_  
_When your dreams were made illegal, by the laws of lesser evil we collide_  
 _but not tonight_

-

Casey has never thought herself optimistic. Nothing is good enough to be true, but nothing's the end either.

The wolves are hungry, but they might be just the same one after all.

Officials come to inspect the damage. A lot has been done over one single day. It will be long before the city recovers. Even longer, its people.

She doesn't know how long Frank will take.

They fix the portal together. When Frank activates the map and asks her where she wants to go, she doesn't look at him when she answers.

The first place she goes to is home.

Casey hugs her dad like she couldn't let go and kisses her brother on both cheeks, and when he asks where the girl from beyond had gone, she can only smile and shake her head. He understands, he always does.

Then she packs her bags and heads north. As always, she tells no one.

Frank doesn't go back home, but she doesn't need to tell him to.

It's sad for him to think nothing's worth salvaging, so she doesn't think of it at all.

-

She returns with a cardboard box tall enough to block her sight.

The halls here are wide and white and stretch endlessly, and her eyes hurt to adjust after so many years of color. Casey sneaks past room after room and finds Frank entirely by sense.

She takes two steps through the office door before she trips over the box.

Frank runs in, arm raised, and before she could curse her heart out he stares and the vaporizing device falls to the floor with a clatter. "Casey?"

Casey squeaks and says, "Honestly, Frank, haven't you heard of gun safety?"

"Jesus." Frank clutches his chest. "Where the hell have you been, kid?"

"Back." Casey winces as she brings her legs up front. She sets the box upright again, checks for damage. "Home."

"No, _not_ home." Frank crouches down to her with an urgency she can't explain. "I saw your dad, and he had _no_ __idea -__ "

"I didn't mean to scare you," she cuts him off, shakily, "I always run away."

Silence. Casey hugs the box tight. "Are you hurt?"

It surprises her enough that she takes a while to realize the lapse of response is on her end. Frank's touching her and he's close to calling her again, he's __close__ _-_

"No." And when Frank looks her over like he's missing something, she adds, like it'll explain everything, "I just brought back some things."

It's the truth for now.

-

Casey walks into the room whistling, towel in both hands. She stops when she sees Frank. "So you talked," she swivels the towel in his direction, "to my dad."

"Yeah." He's reading blueprints, drags the word out, distracted. "And he was worried."

"Wow, okay." She stands behind him and stretches the towel over her head. Frank turns around looking offended. "Okay, I know. I already told him. So let's hear it."

Frank actually pinches his brow. "Hear what?"

Casey flails her arms. The towel flings loose. "Your talk?"

"There was no talk."

Casey gives him a look.

"What?" Casey picks the towel up and resumes rubbing her hair. "I went in, I asked him, 'Where's your daughter?' and he gave me this look and said, 'She'll show up,' so I left."

When he doesn't continue Casey says, "That's it?"

Frank looks at Casey up and down and doesn't answer.

Dissatisfied, she makes to stalk out of the room, when Frank speaks up. "He's a good guy."

Casey turns around. There's something like a smile on his face, something hidden he cannot have. "He's proud of you, kid."

_I know._

-

Casey hasn't seen Frank in the past few days, so she walks in again a week later and puts the box on the desk. There are some electronic layouts scattered on the floor. Casey sorts them out and stops to read halfway through.

She's still reading them when Frank says, from behind her, "You know, I think I saved less of these."

"Oh my god." Casey doesn't shriek, but it's a close thing. Frank's leaning against his desk, holding the box in one hand, with the other reaching in it. "You had other stuff lying around too!"

She turns around properly, to watch him. Carefully, Frank brings the drawer out, paint flaking into chips and pieces of coal, and picks out his keepsakes frame by frame. She knows he treasures each and every one of them, when they're more preserved from the ruins. He had saved them.

He stands there for a while, remembering. His fingers brush the photos like he's reaching for something.

"Oh, uh, yeah," Frank says, reaching past the wall above the desk. It parts, watery, around his hand, and he brings out a brown paper bag. "Take it."

She'd know the heft of it anywhere. Casey reaches into the bag and pulls out her red NASA cap. It's a bit dusty. "Where did you find it?"

"Somewhere under the rubble." Frank stuffs his hands in his pockets. "After the machines cleared the debris I shut them down so they wouldn't - throw it away if they'd found it."

"You kept people out," Casey says, remembering the force field she'd walked into. Absently, she brushes the brim. "I couldn't get in."

Frank shuffles his feet. "Well," he looks down, "it was still dangerous."

In another world, a treacherous one, she would've thought he didn't want people finding it, would've thought him jealous.

She would've, but she doesn't.

"Thank you," she smiles, and holds it close. "That's really nice of you."

He doesn't say anything but just continuously stares at her. It's startling when she doesn't know why.

"If you don't like your dad," she asks instead, when the silence is too much, "why do you keep his wedding picture?"

Face grim, he puts the object in his hands down. "My mom was a very sweet woman." He laughs. "My dad, well... "

He doesn't finish.

"Frank," she says to the ground, softly. "You're not someone strange."

When Casey looks up again Frank's staring enough to make her breath catch. Frank looks at her with a sense of gratitude, with an intensity of something she isn't entirely sure of, that thickens with every step he takes towards her. Casey doesn't dare move.

"Yes," she holds her breath, as he comes close, as he steps in, "but in a way, I didn't _have_ a dad. Not ever." He stands mere inches away. "I couldn't have that."

There is one chance now, and Casey has never been one for letting one slip away.

Her voice is barely a whisper when she asks, "What else can't you have?"

His eyes give it away, but Frank doesn't touch her.

He looks as if he were waiting for her to ask.

Casey gasps in surprise as he takes her hand and kisses her palm, to the inside of her wrist and further down, faster, with a need so overwhelming that rushes through her until her knees are giving out, as Frank takes her waist by both hands, as he crowds her against everything else.

When he pins her wrists to the wall and growls, "Kid," right where she can hear it, she takes it as it is.

-

She sits under the sheets, thin and wrinkled as they are, and watches him. She thinks of her mother and tugs the blanket a little higher. _Oh Casey. It can't hurt now._

But it does.

Frank stands by the window, fingers hooked around the curtain, searching for something that isn't there. A strip of white light stretches across the bed, pale and unnatural, and she stares until he turns around and says, "What?"

Bunching the sheets around her: cautiously, like sudden movements will make him leave, Casey can't bring herself to smile. "They're gone now, you know."

He turns back to the glass, pauses long enough for Casey to open her mouth to _stop it, stop thinkin_ _ _ _g,___ but he says, "Yeah."

She waits until she has to ask.

"Have you ever - "

"No." It's sudden, like a warning, and she starts, scared. Frank closes his eyes and takes his hand off the screen, the fabric fading away into tiles of black.

She watches as the pane turns dark, as Frank turns and opens his eyes apologetically, watches as he set them on her. As the lamps glow brighter, she can see every line of weariness on his face.

She doesn't look away.

-

Later, when she's alone, Casey lays in bed, her _own,_ and touches her bruises, and not for the first time, she hopes.

She hasn't known an ending before, but she feels like this is it.

_"Do you want to go home?"_

_Not without you._

-

She had woken up once on the night before they reopened the gates, gasping for air, tears staining the papers on his desk, _their_ desk.

She'd known he was standing there, that the jacket over her shoulders was his. "Frank?"

It was some seconds before he'd replied. "Yeah, kid."

She'd turned away then, a hand covering a sob, and she hadn't needed to turn back around to see he'd moved to her, a heavy weight, an answer she'd needed.

"Do you want to go home?"

The words contained the slightest tremor, and they meant something to her, even though she doesn't know what, or why.

She doesn't know a lot of things.

When she hadn't answered, and the hand that had lingered had slipped away from hers with an air of finality, she hadn't known then.

But now, though.

Maybe she knows this one.

-

She goes home again, to the only constant she has ever known, and when her father asks what's wrong, she can only shake her head.

When he puts his arms around her, that is when she cries.

Casey cries and cries and tells him everything.

"I'm sorry," she tells him, over and over. "I'm sorry."

Her father only sighs and says, "Oh, Case."

He lets her cry, braids and unbraids her hair until she stops. "He's coming here."

"Wh- no," She moves away from him. If her father had known - "How do you know?"

Looking out in the distance, he lets out a long breath, seeing something she can't. "Because I met him."

_Because he loves you_ ___._ _ _

Her father looks at her then, fondness clear in his eyes. "You would've gotten it soon enough."

She hiccups and punches his arm.

_But does he, really?_

So she waits.

-

Frank's standing in the doorway, where he hasn't moved an inch closer to her for the past few minutes that they've been talking, arguing; she isn't sure she can make him stay.

The day they opened the portal, Casey was scared.

She had wanted to go home, first and foremost, to family, and to reassurance that home will always be with her.

She hadn't looked at him then.

If she had, she might've not wanted to leave at all.

Casey steps forward with a finger pointed down, and this time she does not look away. "Why are you _always_ making the decisions? Listen to me, Frank. I will not let you stay away." _And I won't either. Please don't make me._ _After all we've done -_

Frank keeps his words to himself, just the slightest purse of his lips, as if he was certain on changing her mind, but now he's not so sure anymore.

A man, weathered and accepting, with one hand on the doorrail and one foot on the train step, waiting for the confirmation on his ticket to take him away.

"Ask me again."

"Casey - "

"You won't know if you don't hear me say it, okay?" He's too close to the door, she can't - "so ask me."

There is one terrible silence, and when Frank speaks again he says every word like it's a bad idea. "This is different, okay, we - I don't want," and he looks at her, trying to reason, "to make another mistake."

_And you won't._

It takes Casey some time to realize she'd said it out loud.

She looks up, eyes stinging, to say something, anything else. "Please."

The moments that he take to step in, closer, and kneel down feel like a million years to her. She prays he won't turn away now.

"Do you want - " The slightest shake in his hands, Frank reaches for her own, tentatively, before he can start over. "Do you want me to stay?"

"Yes," Casey nods with an exhale, again and again, and smiles. "Yes, of course." _Always._

-

They watch as the children approach the portal, as they approach the controls where Casey and Frank stand, one by one.

It may have been the atmosphere, vibrant and full of promise, or simply a random thought that prompts her to ask, another question that she isn't sure will offend him anymore. Casey supposes she is testing him. "Do you think she'd known?"

"Who?"

She waits. She watches her brother and her dad talk animatedly over the process, her dad glancing over and catching her eye. Over the panel, her fingers hover aimlessly, waiting for a reply.

Frank takes a breath and pulls her hair back, sets his hands on her shoulders. "I guess we'll never know."

In the end, they come together like the stars, pieces of a constellation, like an inevitable collapse of a sun.

But, after all, nothing's the end.

-

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so not actual smut. The transition to smut was _so_ not smooth. No proofreading, no nothing, please yell if any mistakes are indeed present.  
>  (Also for the whistling bit kinda goes like Settle Down.)  
> As always, lots of love, come and get me at [otp-dilemma](http://otp-dilemma.tumblr.com).


End file.
